I don't think you want this. You are setting links to 1.5em for all states, not just hover. You won't be able see any difference. On top of that, the_duke's note about inline styles is also correct. In general you should only use inline styles if you absolutely have to, and this is usually because they were set with JavaScript. Inline styles override all other styles except those marked with the !important flag (if you need to use this, you are almost always doing it wrong).

Ignoring CSS selector specificity*, styles get applied in the following order:

The above is why we call them cascading style sheets. In addition to this, styles get applied in the order that they appear for each type of stylesheet above. If you set a:link to have a colour of #fff in an external stylesheet and later a colour of #000 (in the same stylesheet) then it will appear black.

*This can be even more annoying than the fact that styles are applied in a cascading manner. For example:

According to what I said above, the latter rule will override the former rule. However, the browser will apply styles with a more specific selector after styles which are less specific, even if the less specific ones are further down in the file. This only applies to styles within the same stylesheet type. An inline style will still override a very specific internal or external selector. See the below example:

Despite the fact that I have a very specific (and downright ugly) selector in the internal stylesheet, the link will still be red. If the inline style was removed, the link would be black rather than red or white.

Specificity is a bit tricky. If an element doesn't get styled how you think it should be, use a tool like Firebug or Chrome's element inspector to see the styles being applied and which styles are being overridden by others. Both tools will show styles in the reverse order that they were applied, so the top-most styles which are not overridden are what you will see rendered.